The Cinéaste's Progress from This List to That Which Is to Come (He Hopes)


Once upon a time, I used to play a coy, rather pointless game w/r/t my annual top ten list -- dramatically "unveiling" it sometime in January, as if most everybody who reads this site didn't already have a pretty good idea of what it was gonna look like. Instead, I now publicly revise the sucker as I go along, so that the whole affair becomes a suspenseful Journey Toward Aesthetic Nirvana. Or something.

Here, then, is what my list would look like if (god forbid) I were forced to make it today:


THE "PURE" LIST (2013 premiere)

01. Coherence (James Ward Byrkit, USA)
02. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, UK)
03. Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski, USA)
04. Proxy (Zack Parker, USA)
05. The Counselor (Ridley Scott, USA)
06. Upstream Color (Shane Carruth, USA)
07. All Is Lost (J.C. Chandor, USA)
08. The Past (Asghar Farhadi, France/Italy)
09. The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh, Cambodia/France)
10. Phil Spector (David Mamet, USA)


THE "POLLS" LIST (2013 commercial release)

01. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, USA)
02. First Cousin Once Removed (Alan Berliner, USA)
03. Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski, USA)
04. The Counselor (Ridley Scott, USA)
05. Upstream Color (Shane Carruth, USA)
06. All Is Lost (J.C. Chandor, USA)
07. The Past (Asghar Farhadi, France/Italy)
08. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! (Alain Resnais, France/Germany)
09. Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel, France/UK/USA)
10. Drug War (Johnnie To, Hong Kong/China)